Medical devices, such as implantable medical devices (IMDs), are used for monitoring and/or treatment of a wide variety of patient conditions. For example, medical devices are used as cardiac monitors or pacemakers, neurostimulators, or drug deliver devices. The operation of a medical device may be controlled or programmed by another device. In the case of an IMD, the device may be external to the patient.
Inappropriate programming of a medical device may pose a hazardous condition for the patient monitored or treated by the medical device. Traditionally, to ensure a high level of patient safety, instruments for programming, controlling, or otherwise interacting with medical devices have been run in heavily controlled environments, and deployed in a very limited range of configurations. These instruments utilize device-specific hardware and software operated by custom operating systems that are typically neither bootable by, nor capable of interacting with, the operating system in a general purpose computer system, such as a personal computer (PC).